The more I read in Poor People, the more I ( a global warming anguishist) crabbily began to notice the unmentioned jet rides: to Russia, Thailand, Yemen, Vietnam, Japan, China, etc., etc. There are a lot of these etceteras in the pages of Poor People; William Vollman can't be accused of having a small carbon footprint, at least not in his travel habits. However, very few of us living la vida moderna are pure in this respect, unlike the majority of people in Vollman's book. Except when they make once-in-a-lifetime desperate attempts to migrate to a better life, the people Vollman interviewed pretty much seem to stay in place.
Vollman wrestles with the definition of poverty, constructing an income table of subsistence earning around the world--but, as he writes, how do you establish equivalencies between "one person's 'living normally' and another's unqualified 'need' versus his 'rock bottom' need?" Another question Vollman asks (this is a question he prods readers into asking, as well) is "Would I grow wretched as I imagine, were I transformed into one of them? Actually, the bright, humid slowness of their lives gives me hope that I could 'adjust'."
He writes about the invisibility of poor people, and his most chilling example of this is what happens when people to whom invisibility is culturally prescribed--e.g., women in Taliban Afganistan--lose their safety net and become doubly invisible. In Taliban Afganistan, women who become destitute are forbidden even to beg because they are not allowed to be seen, in the name of respect for women.
Vollman asks poor people what they think: why are some people rich, some poor? They cite education, they cite intelligence, they cite selfishness. One poor young man in Mexico agrees that the rich are selfish: "They guard what they have.... It could happen that they will lose their money and be poor in the street and it will be a poor person who helps them out."
The author writes about Kazakhstan, where there is a consortium of oil producers, Tengizchevroil (TCO), headquartered in a very small town I'd never heard of, where old houses, the house of the poor, are being torn down for hotels and office buildings and almost everything connected with TCO is top secret. From government officials to workers to interpreters--if they're willing to talk at first, they soon aren't. Due to oil refining, almost everyone in the has dire health problems. And most people Vollman encounters aren't willing to talk about that. However, as one young resident tells Vollman, "On the one hand, we think about our health. On the other hand, we think about money from oil." Of course, as Vollman notes, they aren't the only ones, writing "We create the demand for TCO's product, we pollute the atmosphere with it, and...we don't give a rat's ass." (Pause here to think about jets. However, it can't be said Vollman doesn't give a rat's ass.)
